Description:
Although livestock welfare issues were once barely visible to mainstream consumers, animal welfare activists now combine traditional public media advocacy with digital media advocacy to spread their campaign message and mobilise consumers. This article examines one attempt to mainstream animal welfare issues: Animals Australia's' 'Make It Possible' multimedia campaign. Specifically, we contend that the campaign puts into circulation an 'affective economy' (Ahmed, 2004a, 2004b) aimed at proposing and entrenching new modes of everyday behaviour. Core affective positions and their circulation in this economy are considered from three interrelated articulations of this campaign: the release of and public response to the YouTube campaign video; Coles' short-lived offering of campaign shopping bags; and public engagement in the 'My Make It Possible Story' website. Analysis also opens up broader questions concerning the relationship between online activism and everyday life, asking how articulations in one domain translate to everyday practices.
Description:
Although livestock welfare issues were once barely visible to mainstream consumers, animal welfare activists now combine traditional public media advocacy with digital media advocacy to spread their campaign message and mobilise consumers. This article examines one attempt to mainstream animal welfare issues: Animals Australia's' 'Make It Possible' multimedia campaign. Specifically, we contend that the campaign puts into circulation an 'affective economy' (Ahmed, 2004a, 2004b) aimed at proposing and entrenching new modes of everyday behaviour. Core affective positions and their circulation in this economy are considered from three interrelated articulations of this campaign: the release of and public response to the YouTube campaign video; Coles' short-lived offering of campaign shopping bags; and public engagement in the 'My Make It Possible Story' website. Analysis also opens up broader questions concerning the relationship between online activism and everyday life, asking how articulations in one domain translate to everyday practices.
Description:
Although livestock welfare issues were once barely visible to mainstream consumers, animal welfare activists now combine traditional public media advocacy with digital media advocacy to spread their campaign message and mobilise consumers. This article examines one attempt to mainstream animal welfare issues: Animals Australia's' 'Make It Possible' multimedia campaign. Specifically, we contend that the campaign puts into circulation an 'affective economy' (Ahmed, 2004a, 2004b) aimed at proposing and entrenching new modes of everyday behaviour. Core affective positions and their circulation in this economy are considered from three interrelated articulations of this campaign: the release of and public response to the YouTube campaign video; Coles' short-lived offering of campaign shopping bags; and public engagement in the 'My Make It Possible Story' website. Analysis also opens up broader questions concerning the relationship between online activism and everyday life, asking how articulations in one domain translate to everyday practices.
Description:
Cardiomyopathy caused by lamin A/C gene (LMNA) mutations (hereafter referred as LMNA cardiomyopathy) is an anatomic and pathologic condition associated with muscular and electrical dysfunction of the heart, often leading to heart failure-related disability. There is currently no specific therapy available for patients that target the molecular pathophysiology of LMNA cardiomyopathy. We showed here an increase in oxidative stress levels in the hearts of mice carrying LMNA mutation, associated with a decrease of the key cellular antioxidant glutathione (GHS). Oral administration of N-acetyl cysteine, a GHS precursor, led to a marked improvement of GHS content, a decrease in oxidative stress markers including protein carbonyls and an improvement of left ventricular structure and function in a model of LMNA cardiomyopathy. Collectively, our novel results provide therapeutic insights into LMNA cardiomyopathy.
Description:
Much has been written about ethical and human-centred Information Systems (IS) design, most recently regarding the deleterious outcomes and negative affect of some machine learning applications that embed and perpetuate unethical or even inhumane automation. Terms such as ‘harm’, ‘damage’, and surprisingly, ‘weapon’ have entered the language of this discourse. However, these characteristics are not unique to applications of data science but have long manifested in IS that can also can exhibit opacity and establish tight vicious cycles. These, when coupled with a lack of governance feedback, can perpetuate injustice that has community or sector-wide reach. In this paper, we explore how IS design that sets out with the best of intentions or at least, conceived as a ‘neutral’ system for managing transactional information, can emerge as ‘tools that punish’. We argue that there are crucial principles to be taken from Recordkeeping Informatics, concerned as it is with the entanglement of information and people across space and through time on multi-generational timescales. In particular we discuss how transdisciplinary and critical approaches are necessary to cover more of the design space and surface issues, rights, stakeholders, and, most importantly, values that may be otherwise hidden from a here-and-now, transactional viewpoint.
Description:
Objective: To determine the rate of injury in junior Australian football, and to describe the patterns and severity of these injuries across nine levels of play (U9 to U18). Design: Prospective cohort study. Setting: Junior Australian football games and training sessions were observed for 54 teams from New South Wales and Victoria over the 2004 playing season. Participants: Six teams from each level of play were invited to participate in the study. Overall, data were collected for 51 teams over 40 208 hours of player exposure. Independent variables: Participation and injury data were collected prospectively. Main outcome measures: Injury was defined as "any trauma that causes some disability or pain''. Injury severity was identified by the action of players immediately after the injury event. Results: The overall injury rate was 18.0 (95% CI 16.6 to 19.3) injuries per 1000 player hours. The main cause of injury was body contact (67.3%). There was an increased frequency of sprains and strains, and injury severity with increasing level of play. The rates of injury for players who stayed off the field (6.4 injuries per 1000 hours, 95% CI 5.6 to 7.2) or were advised to seek off-field medical advice (5.0 injuries per 1000 hours, 95% CI 4.3 to 5.7) were low. Conclusion: Compared with the adult game, junior Australian football is relatively safe. However, injury rates increase as children progress across age-determined levels of play towards the more adult form of the game.
Description:
Severe congenital neutropenia (SCN) is a heterogeneous bone marrow failure syndrome predisposing to myelodysplastic syndrome and acute myeloid leukaemia (MDS/AML). We studied 82 North American and Australian SCN patients enrolled in the Severe Chronic Neutropenia International Registry who were on long-term treatment with granulocyte colony-stimulating factor and for whom the neutrophil elastase (ELA2) gene was sequenced. There was no significant difference in the risk of MDS/AML in patients with mutant versus wild-type ELA2: the respective cumulative incidences at 15 years were 36% and 25% (P = 0.96). Patients with either mutant or wild-type ELA2 should be followed closely for leukaemic transformation.
Description:
Background: The promotion of sport and physical activity (PA) for children is widely recommended to support a healthy lifestyle, but being engaged in sport bears the risk of sustaining injuries. Injuries, in turn, can lead to a reduction in current and future involvement in PA and, therefore, may negatively affect future health as well as quality of life. Thus, sports injury prevention is of particular importance in youth. Objective: The aim of this systematic review was to quantify the effectiveness of exercise-based injury prevention programs in child and adolescent sport in general, and with respect to different characteristics of the target group, injury prevention program, and outcome variables. Data Sources: An Internet-based literature search was conducted in six databases (CINAHL, Cochrane, EMBASE, ISI Web of Science, PubMed, SPORTDiscus) using the following search terms with Boolean conjunction: (sport injur* OR athletic injur* OR sport accident*) AND (prevent* OR prophylaxis OR avoidance) AND (child* OR adolescent OR youth). Study Selection: Randomized controlled trials and controlled intervention studies in organized sport, published in English in a peer-reviewed journal, analyzing the effects of an exercise-based injury prevention program in athletes younger than 19 years of age. Data Extraction: Two reviewers evaluated eligibility and methodological quality. Main outcome extracted was the rate ratio (RR). Statistical analyses were conducted using the inverse-variance random effects model. Results: Twenty-one trials, conducted on a total of 27,561 athletes (median age 16.7 years [range 10.7-17.8]), were included. The overall RR was 0.54 (95% CI 0.45-0.67) [p < 0.001]. Girls profited more from injury prevention than boys (p = 0.05). Both prevention programs with a focus on specific injuries (RR 0.48 [95% CI 0.37-0.63]) and those aiming at all injuries (RR 0.62 [95% CI 0.48-0.81]) showed significant reduction effects. Pre-season and in-season interventions were similarly beneficial (p = 0.93). Studies on programs that include jumping/plyometric exercises showed a significant better (p = 0.002) injury preventive effect (RR 0.45 [95 % CI 0.35-0.57], Z = 6.35, p < 0.001) than studies without such exercises (RR 0.74 [95% CI 0.61-0.90], Z = 3.03, p = 0.002). Conclusions: The results provide good evidence and clearly demonstrate beneficial effects of exercise-based injury prevention programs in youth sports as they can result in statistically significant and practically relevant injury reduction. In particular, multimodal programs including jumping/plyometric exercises can be recommended. However, there is a considerable lack of data for children (under 14 years of age) and for individual sports in general. Future research should include these groups and focus on the effect of specific exercises and compliance.
Description:
This paper presents a canonical dual approach for solving general non- linear algebraic systems. By using least square method, the nonlinear system of m -quadratic equations in n -dimensional space is first formulated as a nonconvex opti- mization problem. We then proved that, by the canonical duality theory developed by the second author, this nonconvex problem is equivalent to a concave maximization problem in R, which can be solved easily by well-developed convex optimization techniques. Both existence and uniqueness of global optimal solutions are discussed, and several illustrative examples are presented.
Description:
This paper presents a canonical dual approach for solving a non-linear population growth problem governed by the well-known logistic equation. Using the finite difference and least squares methods, the non-linear differential equation is first formulated as a non-convex optimization problem with unknown parameters. We then prove that by the canonical duality theory, this non-convex problem is equivalent to a concave maximization problem over a convex feasible space, which can be solved easily to obtain a global optimal solution to this challenging problem. Several illustrative examples are presented.
Description:
This paper considers a new canonical duality theory for solving mixed integer quadratic programming problem. It shows that this well-known NP -hard problem can be converted into concave maximization dual problems without duality gap. And the dual problems can be solved, under certain conditions, by polynomial algorithms.